Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre is headed to the big screen, with actors Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark on board, Variety reports.
Daniel Kokotajlo will direct the actors in an adaptation of Hurley’s 2019 horror novel, which follows Richard and Juliette, a British couple in the 1970s whose son starts behaving oddly. The two try to find comfort in different ways, but their lives are thrown into disarray when they make a startling discovery.
In a 2019 interview with Sublime Horror, Hurley said his book “is about families, about the effects of grief and bereavement, and the various ways in which people try and deal with that.”
“It’s an exploration of the difficulty of grief,” he said. “The word that kept coming to me when I was writing it was ‘psychosis,’ that it does generate this sense of madness. Being bereaved is very bewildering, it’s very confusing, it’s seemingly endless, and whatever we try and do to get out of it is seemingly futile.”
Smith, known for his roles on Doctor Who and The Crown, will play Richard, while Clark, who’s set to star in Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings series, will star as Juliette.
Starve Acre will be the second feature film from Kokotajlo, whose movie Apostasy was released in 2017. The film is being produced by Emma Duffy (Eternal Beauty), Juliette Howell (The Wonder), and Tessa Ross (Billy Elliot) for BBC Film.
“Daniel is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today and we’re thrilled to be bringing his adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s extraordinary novel to the screen,” Ross told Variety. “Starve Acre is already a genre defining modern classic—Daniel’s singular vision and this exceptional cast bring great depth and strength to this evocative story.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
